Obama Sandbags the Archbishop

At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes.

Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter.

In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals, and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employes, free contraceptives, free sterilizations, and free “morning-after” pills.

Parishioners were urged to contact their representatives in Congress to bring about a reversal of President Obama’s new policy.

Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to say the course.

In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops.

Should the Church submit, its moral authority in America would disappear.

Now, undeniably, the church milquetoast of past decades that refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics allowed the impression to form that while the hierarchy may protest, eventually it will go along to get along with a Democratic Party that was once home to most Catholics.

Obama’s problem today is that not only is he forcing the Church to violate her conscience, he dissed the highest prelate in America.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an “extraordinarily friendly” meeting with Obama at the White House.

The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop

He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Dolan, who went on:

“To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. … This represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is “Obamacare.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America is celebrating the new policy. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, calls it a “health care issue … based on what’s best for women’s health.” Others have argued that many Catholic women practice birth control.

But that Catholics choose to ignore doctrine does not justify the U.S. government imposing on Catholic institutions a policy that violates Catholic teaching.

Even Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne, in a Jan. 30 column titled “Obama’s Breach of Faith,” charges that the president “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus. …

“Speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government … the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings.”

Why did Obama do it?

Facing a close race for a second term, Obama chose not to antagonize his left. Yet he must have known that siding with them meant leaving Archbishop Dolan with egg all over his face. Obama, calculatedly, came down on the side of those he believes to be more crucial to his re-election.

This affront should tell the Catholic hierarchy, if they did not already know, where they stand in the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebilius. And where they sit — in the back of the bus.

Yet if the bishops will look upon this crisis of conscience, this insult, as an opportunity, they can effect its reversal and recapture a measure of the moral authority they have lately lost.

Not only should the bishops file suit in federal court against the president and Sebelius for violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, they should inform the White House that no bishop will give an invocation at the Democratic Convention.

Then, they should inform the White House that in the last two weeks of the 2012 campaign, priests in every parish will read from the pulpit at Sunday mass a letter denouncing Obama as anti-Catholic for denying the Church its right to live according to its beliefs.

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30 Responses to Obama Sandbags the Archbishop

The difficulty that Obama and American “liberals” in general have created for themselves is that they have turned the guarantee of religious freedom in the First Amendment from an institutional right, respecting the church and how it is to be neither a creature of nor imposed upon by the state, into a personal freedom for all people to exercise free will according to their conscience. Acknowledge the right of the Catholic (or any) Church to “opt out” of Obamacare on religious grounds and that right would extend to individuals as well.

When I was young I was told there were a number of Christians who refused to buy insurance of any sort because they considered it a form of immoral gambling. Even at the time I was ordained as a minister, in 1989, Uncle Sam recognized the right of ministers in church bodies who made it a point of doctrine not to participate in the Social Security system. Now Obama is arguing before the Supreme Court that the needs of the nation and the commerce clause give him the power to compel private citizens to engage in “commerce”, the purchase of commercial health insurance contracts, and that that power trumps all scruples of conscience. If he makes exception for the Catholic Church are other Americans to be denied equal protection?

Mitt Romney made the case for Obamacare as he did for Romneycare when he noted that since the citizens of Massachusetts (or the United States) were going to pay for the health care of the uninsured anyway, those same citizens had the right to make the shirkers in their midst pay up, even for contraception, abortion, etc. Only Ron Paul had the temerity to state that the force of principle compelled him to say that the State is not obliged, nor should it be permitted, to pay for anyone’s health care – the use of public funds to pay for a private good. When you give the state the authority of being “in loco parentis” to all its citizens you declare those citizens to be wards of the state and subject to its commands.

Will it make much difference if the Catholic Church should make the President back down and exempt it from his power grab, when individual Catholics will be obliged to pay for all that the Church objects to? That would be the definition of “Pyrrhic victory”.

Along with a separation of Church and State,there should be a separation of Medicine from the State. Once America goes down the road of socialized medicine in any form (Medicare,Medicaid,Obamacare etc.) then the State,acting in the interest of the Taxpayers can dictate any policy it wants. In other words,”He who pays the piper calls the tune.” Once the State involves itself in paying,either directly or indirectly,for Health Care they can mandate Birth Control,Diet,Food Selection,”Gate Keeping” as to who gets what services when and where,even who lives and dies. The dictates and controls are politicized and endless. Its time to get the Federal Government totally out of Health Care. Its either or.

Not that the issues Buchanan and William Dalton raise don’t have their merit, but aren’t they sort of at least muted if not mooted by what I believe is the reality that if the Catholic Church doesn’t want to insure its employees for X, Y or Z it doesn’t have to because it doesn’t have to provide them with any insurance at all?

And isn’t this what we’re seeing already with ObamaCare in terms of other employers more and more not providing any insurance at all and channeling their employees directly into one of the (seemingly innumerable, mostly state-run) government insurance schemes?

So isn’t this somewhat of the bigger issue here?

For my part I wonder if the health-care field and market isn’t so screwed up (by gov’t mostly, such as with Medicare and Medicaid, but already too long and deeply to do anything about it) that the Republicans *should* have just accepted reality and gone for a One-Payer system that would be easier to police?

I dunno about everyone else, but I can’t help but think that there’s lots of merit to simplicity here. And I can’t work up too much sympathy either for those who don’t want to pay for any health-care insurance. Unless they’re simultaneously offering to post a huge bond holding us taxpayers harmless when *they* run into a tree, what, after all, are they really saying? We should trust them because they’re gonna be good for the millions in services they’re gonna ring up?

Yeah, right.

And doesn’t a single-payer program eliminate this and the constitutional problem too? No longer would you be forced to purchase a private good: You just pay your taxes and the government provides that good as a public one—and then we’ll see who refuses to use it out of principle?

(Indeed, the idea that even under ObamaCare it *is* a tax of sorts is I believe the reason the Supreme Court is going to uphold the scheme.)

Not that I don’t know the kind of crap that would attend almost any Single-Payer plan, but we at least have other countries’ experiences to learn what details to especially take and what to avoid, and again at least there’s only one program to monitor rather than 50+.

In addition to crap I just foresee utter chaos too under Obamacare. And crap is hard enough to eliminate even when it’s out in the clear and not being obscured by surrounding chaos.

As a person who believes the whole issue of contraception/abortion is none of the govenrment’s business; if the Church offers insurance; so should the contents of it be.
I disagree with Ron Paul on the issue of abortion (for example) but I agree completely that the state should not be paying for it NOR dictating about it(or other private goods).

From what I can see the RCC heirarchy has zero credibility in “I can’t work up too much sympathy either for those who don’t want to pay for any health-care insurance. Unless they’re simultaneously offering to post a huge bond holding us taxpayers harmless when *they* run into a tree, what, after all, are they really saying? We should trust them because they’re gonna be good for the millions in services they’re gonna ring up? ”

Presumably, there would be bonding companies for such people. In effect, these folks would be buying very kludgy insurance.

From what I can see the RCC heirarchy has zero credibility in sexual and family matters. The self identified RCC population is not much different from the general population in birth control and acceptance and use. The bishops will find themselves generals without an army on this issue.

Accepting your point only for the sake of argument, under Obama care, employees WILL NOT be able to go out and get insurance policies of their choice. The employees will have to accept insurance policies whose coverage of various items is dictated by Obama care.

Where are your employee rights?

But to get back to you point: Employers have always been able to decide what insurance policies are available for their employees (a few employers allow employees to go out in the market to pick their own policy, but that is the exception, not the rule). Why is that? Because the employer traditionally paid for the insurance policy (although, now, less and less employers are able to provide health insurance at all because of the cost and regulation).

Face it, Obama care is about denial of choice. Did you know that the medical insurance industry supported Obama care because it guranteed a captured market which could be divided up among the cartel members?

Buchanan, you tribal loyalty to Catholicism is blinding you to several facts:

1. Absp. Wuerl is the same archbishop who refused publicly to execute Canon 215, which demands that archbishops deny the Eucharist to elected officials who support legalized abortion. Now he’s starting to defend the Church’s “honor”? Puh-leeze! He’s nothing but a rank careerist (as is the vast majority of the American hierarchy) who wants it both ways: He doesn’t want to antagonize Rome while maintaining his access to the portals of secular power.

2. The USCCB has been in bed with Pres. Obama since the 2008 election. Granted, they haven’t supported his views on abortion. But they did donate money to ACORN before that organization was exposed and became a political liability for the bishops. They do support universal health care, which means government control wherever it’s been tried in the Western world. They do engage in the same kind of superficial, sentimentalist rhetoric about “social justice” that the Obama Administration — and, let’s be honest, the Vatican — uses.

Now the bishops are “shocked, shocked!” to find that Pres. Obama doesn’t mean what he says? Their lack of discernment and wisdom, as well as that same lack among liberal Catholics, is quite revealing and sickening (more on that later).

Pres. Obama played the bishops and liberal Catholics perfectly: Lure them into the trap by using the same rhetoric to which they are infatuated, then shut it when it’s too late for them to escape.

Now as far as that lack of discernment goes….

The Church, in the person of the Vatican, made this mistake before: in the 1930s, when it negotiated concordats with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. That doesn’t mean the Vatican or the bishops are proto-fascists. It does mean that the Catholic Church tends to favor centralized government solutions to social problems (the rhetoric about “subsidiarity” is nothing but a farce) over individualized solutions.

Once again, history repeats itself and the Church learns nothing from the past, despite its reverence for it.

My question is, what do you do about the huge number of unemployed and underemployed who will NEVER be able to afford enriching these bankster/insurance/brokerage monopolies, now mandated by law to be so enriched?

Current prices for so-called insurance are $15,000 after taxes, for coverage with so many exclusions and co-pays you can never actually use it if your income is not above average.

That the hyper-captalist oligarch Romney basically de facto backs “Obamacare” as it mirrors his own “Romneycare” tells us to whose elite benefit both the status quo and the coming national mandate serve.

Regardless of how it empties their savings or forces pauperism upon them, now every person must pay tribute to completely unaccountable private and enormously wealthy entities only interested in uninterruptible income streams from those they impoverish.

As Charles Murray observes, this is a nation that has betrayed its original founding principles, for everything that is occurring lessens the possibility of equality through either hard work or merit for those not among the elite.

I agree – Buchanan’s correct over all, but the Catholic left should’ve seen this coming. Another instance of the beast devouring the mother of harlots – just like Poland in the 1930’s. LIberal Catholics got this guy elected, for pete’s sake. The 2nd time the mule kicks you, it’s your fault.

I am someone who left the Roman Catholic Church and became Russian Orthodox, but on matters such as this I will stand by the Roman Catholic Church because Catholic institutions should not be forced to break Catholic teaching for a government mandate. The government can straight up go to hell.

And yet, will not many, if not most, Catholics break from their faith and vote for Obama? Catholic leadership has lost their creditability with their blind support of liberal causes and socialism, and their chickens come home to roost… Afterall, didn’t the German Catholics support Hitler too?

What liberal causes and socialism do you speak of? Or are you just saying that Catholics are liberals and socialists because they don’t try to make capitalism as something straight from God and they don’t hold fast to the Protestant work ethic? Also what is the point of saying some Catholics supported Hitler because amongst the Nazi Party was also German Lutherans and anti-religious types as well.

Dimitry, I suggest you google “Pope Benedict XVI” and “Caritas in Veritae,” an encyclical in which he advocated establishing a universal “authority” (his term) to deal with international finance and economics. If that doesn’t speak to the infatuation with centralized authority over “subsidiarity,” then I don’t know what does.

In reference to Pope Benedict’s Third Encyclical when there is talk about a “Universal Authority” it is NOT his term. It was a term first used by Pope John XXII in one of his own encyclicals: I think it was his last one “Peace On Earth” published in the spring of 1963 before he died. I myself do not know what kind of term in meant himself because it is kind of vague, but that is the main point. Benedict did not come up with that term himself, because early on in the encyclical he speaks out against too much government power. Also please be aware that the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace also had a hand in writing this document.

Maybe the RC hierarchy has failed to some degree. As an evangelical, I wonder why my fellow evangelicals fail to pay attention to these developments. It is like we’re the second of the sheep to go to slaughter and still don’t see it coming.

@Joseph D’Hippolito…I know about it. It’s a bad idea because even if something like that is implemented in Europe the Catholic Church still isn’t going to have any real influence in it. The Russian Orthodox Church has more influence in post-Communist Russia than the Roman Catholic Church has in liberal democratic Western Europe of the 21st century. The Roman Church has always sought Centralized Authority if it didn’t then there would have never been a schism in 1054 and the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches would be ONE, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in communion with one another like they were throughout the first millenia.

I don’t understand the fuss about a state run medical system. We have had one in Australia since 1983. There are 2 components

1 a government “Medicare levy” collected in the same way as income tax- 1.5% of your taxable income.

2 (for those who want private insurance cover as well) private health insurance which costs my family $485 per month and there is a government rebate of 30% of this which one claims back when lodging your tax return. Most of the funds are mutual -not for profit, though the largest is a government owned fund; its largest not because people are forced to belong to it but because those who belong think it the best. The funds community rate- ie there are no additional fees for people with higher risk profiles.

In total the system costs me (and I am in the top 25% of taxpayers so my levy is higher than most) less than $4000 a year. True the state and federal governments pay more money -largely to fund the capital costs of public hosptials which are the main hospitals here

How does it work in practice? I can answer that anecdotally- my daughter is severely disabled, she has many chronic medical problems (epilepsy, hydrocephalus for starters) and she has never had to wait for treatment, and all treatments (including expensive surgery) has been available to her.

There are no medical bankruptcies in Australia.

A government scheme works in Australia. It is cheaper and it provides better outcomes than your systems.

And that then brings back the pragmatism that all conservatives should adopt- from Edmund Burke onwards a test has been of any policy -not its philosophical basis, not whether it conforms to a system but whether it is practical, whether it works. That was Burke’s objection to the Stamp Acts and the Tea Duty that led to your revolution- that the Crown could not enforce them (see his speech in parliament here http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv1c2.html )not that the Imperial Parliament did not have the power to do so but that it would not be able to collect it and if it tried it would (as it indeed did) provoke a revolution. That was also Lord Hailsham’s principal point about ‘balance’ in “the Case for Conservatism”

In reference to Pope Benedict’s Third Encyclical when there is talk about a “Universal Authority” it is NOT his term. It was a term first used by Pope John XXII in one of his own encyclicals: I think it was his last one “Peace On Earth” published in the spring of 1963 before he died. I myself do not know what kind of term in meant himself because it is kind of vague, but that is the main point. Benedict did not come up with that term himself, because early on in the encyclical he speaks out against too much government power.

People, people! If the Bishop of Rome formally uses a term … whoever originated such expression … it’s unquestionably his term. Of course, the more vague the expression, the better.

Given the term’s acknowledged vagueness, it could represent a possible endorsement for the return of Pope Honorius II’s Order of the Knights Templar (January 1129, Council of Troyes), and its authority “to deal with international finance and economics.”

That order sure knew its banking, to all accounts. And in Innocent II’s papal bull Omne Datum Optimum (“Every Perfect Gift;” 1139), the Order was declared free of every ecclesiastical and secular authority, including the patriarch of Jerusalem … save the pope himself.

You’d think the church would fight this as the voters involved might be crucial to Obama’s reelection hopes. Then again is it possible Obama made some kind of deal in exchange for relative silence.
A single payer plan like Tom B writes would eleiminate this as an issue. Like a flat tax, a balanced budget amendment and Simpson Bowles it requires political courage so unlikely to happen

But, but, but… surely no good Catholic will avail themselves of the contraception option, and the whole thing will be moot? Thought not. Methinks the gnashing of teeth is more about the need to control than about religious freedom.

@Apostle, can you explain what point you are trying to make? Mine is that I don’t understand the American opposition to the idea of a state run health insurance scheme. Yes there may- and probably will be- problems with its implimentation (Such as Mr Buchanon has posted here) but what is wrong with the idea?

Mr. Kirsop,
“What is wrong” with the idea is that we want as liitle government control of our lives as possible. Admittedly, there is very little freedom left to hold on to, but that makes what is left all the more precious. Allowing government to become the eight hundred pound gorilla in the corner of the operating room is a giant step in the wrong direction. I lived in Australia for nearly five years, and so I can appreciate how hard this concept is for the average Aussie to grasp. I was there when Whitlam got the sack – woke up one morning (ok, afternoon) to find that the democratically elected leader of the country had got fired as summarily as any entry-level clerk, via a phone call from Great Britain – and I saw how it caused barely a ripple amongst the populace. I doubt that a people this tame can ever understand American politics.

Seems to me Obamacare deserves a thread of its own, but in lieu of that it also seems to me that those here objecting to it don’t put forward any alternatives to it much less to my preference for a Single Payer plan.

Instead what I see is just the idea, as Mr. Jacobi puts it, that we don’t want more government in our lives, and while I’m highly sympathetic to same when it comes to medical care I think the horses have long fled the barn and it’s just impossible to get back to anything along that line that would work.

The problem clearly is just simply in the fantastical costs now of health care. “Get government out of it” now to me means simply waves of health-care bankruptcies, with the vast majority of everyone simply waiting their turn for some medical emergency or need to strike to join the queue at the Bankruptcy Court’s doors.

You fall and hit your head or get in a bad car accident and … within 24 hours your medical bills will very possible equal your yearly income.

Granted, in my view much if not most of this has been caused by government in the first place with Medicare and Medicaid giving the two biggest consumers of health care—the old and the poor—cards that allowed them to use as much as they liked. Just like what would happen if you gave, say, 60% of all adults cards they could use to buy any cars they want: In a very short period of time almost ever car made would be gold-plated and the cost of every car would be astronomical.

But it’s too late to undo that, and we ain’t going to get rid of or even significantly chop Medicaid or Medicare. Especially now when it means that instead of taking care of Mom or Dad we can just get ’em in a nursing home and the Gub’mint pays.

So what’s the alternatives? Obamacare or some such monster, allowing a carnival of utterly incomprehensible mischief by health-care providers and insurers and that various states and agencies involved? (E.g., such as the law that *already* doesn’t allow you to sue your HMO no matter *what* it’s done to you.)

Or, like I say, a Single-Payer Plan, which almost certainly would have to ration care true, but at least could be done somewhat rationally rather than the utterly irrational rationing we see now on the basis of all kinds of things. Go ahead now, for instance, and put someone in Bankruptcy due to their medical bills or indeed whatever bills they have. They *then* get *better* health care than you do because they *are* on the dole.

That’s just nuts. And just contributes to the problem of all our health-care prices going up.

At some point it seems to me reality ought to trump ideology. I’m pretty libertarian so government running health care sure don’t viscerally appeal to me, but it’s long past the time Americans would say medical care isn’t a right. And once you make it a right you have to provide it to those who can’t afford *any* of it, and once you do that long enough you get the situation we have now of insane prices.

So I at least don’t know what else to do but have government in it big-time, and all I know is that I’m sure that the more complex you make that the worse you are going to be which is why I’m against Obamacare but in favor of a Single-Payer Plan.

Yeah there’s bad stories about it from other places, but then there’s stories like Mr. Kirsop’s above from Australia.

So instead of trying to construct some brand-new, unique, hugely complex Frankenstein monster like we have with Obamacare, isn’t it more likely to get us a better result to just look at other countries’ already existing experiences with Single Payer Plans and try to take what works and avoid what doesn’t? And come up with something at least humanely comprehensible?

Or are we just so brilliant that such a mundane way of approaching things is beneath us?